Last summer (2022), our daughter came to my husband (82) and me (72) with what sounded like a positively crazy idea: She suggested we buy a house together and combine households! She even had a house picked out for all of us!
Though Fred and I were completely taken off guard by the idea of living with our daughter, her husband - who is totally in favor of all this - and their new baby, right from the start we wondered if perhaps God might be using our daughter to speak to us about our future.
Over a period of months, our daughter has kept on this topic, had us look at other houses to share, as well as a couple prospective houses for us in her neighborhood. A few months ago she even suggested our buying rural property together and then building side by side houses on the acreage. Most recently she found a house we genuinely like on the street just behind her house and got us considering that option again.
The fact that Fred still works full time from home as an engineer and I am actively working as an abstract artist from my home studio, as well as being very much engaged in running our house, caring for our dogs, doing freelance writing, and devoting hours a day to playing Chopin on the piano, certainly does NOT make the case for our needing our daughter's help and support at this time but of course we know that the day is coming when we very well may need her help. While we see that day as being 5 to 10 years down the road, our daughter's most recent point, that we should make the move now to be close to her while we're healthy and independent and able to be totally in charge of every decision, actually makes a lot of sense to us. As a result, last month we made our decision: We are totally onboard and are currently prepping our house to be put on the market and looking to move 30 minutes away to our daughter’s neighborhood.
In fact, we have already found a very nice house just one street away from our daughter. The owner has done a lot of upgrades on the house, very good upgrades, almost too good really, which means there's very little room to negotiate if the seller is to recover the cost of the designer kitchen cabinets, the new high end stove, new granite counters, so called luxury tile planks in the kitchen and bathrooms, refinished wooden floors, etc.
At present (March 2023) our house isn't listed yet and our latest contingency offer on the house we want to buy has not gotten a response. I am agonizing over all this and have lost a bunch of sleep this week. I have to keep reminding myself that God is in charge, not me! But this much is clear: If this moves forward Fred and I are heading into a total reinvention of our senior years, which includes a level of family unity and sharing we never even considered possible. At this point, we have no idea how this is going to play out!
